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Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Where Candy Comes From 7.4.12

Happy Fourth of July to everyone in America. For the rest of you, happy Wednesday! When Eric and I took our mini-vacation to Bend last month, we packed a lot of stuff into a short amount of time. It was still pretty relaxing though, which is always key in a getaway. One of the items we ticked off our itinerary was a trip to Goody’s Chocolate and Ice Cream Factory. We are both kids at heart and wondered what a two-dollar tour would consist of. Goody’s supplies candy and ice cream to its “local” stores and also ships chocolates to your home (if you don’t live in a place where it’s super warm). They manufacture 20 tons of chocolate a year, which may seem like a lot, but it’s pretty small compared to the bigger candy brands like Hershey.

Look at all the candy! This isn't even all the varieties.

For our $2, we were given a 15-minute tour and six candy samples as we were learning about each and watching (most of) them being made. Goody’s doesn't add any preservatives to their candies and the chocolate is gluten-free, so it’s a pure treat that you can certainly tell the freshness in.

We started our visit out with some chocolate covered potato chips, because you can’t just wait around for chocolate when you already HAVE ACCESS to chocolate, and wandered around the “museum”. Granted, the museum was the size of my bathroom, but they packed a lot of interesting facts and historical items in that small space. Like did you have any idea what a cacao tree looked like? Did you know a cacao pod is like the size of your head? Me neither!

Working hard to bring you delicious, delicious treats.

So, Goody’s makes all kinds of candy, from chocolate covered cherries to caramel corn and then also makes delicious ice cream with local ingredients. It was really creamy and made a nice end to our tour. Along the way, you got to peer in the windows at the workers and learn about what they were doing and what each machine did.

Poor me, having to try out "irregular" minty chocolate.

Candy-making is a lot of hard work and it takes experts to really make each batch perfect. Of course, sometimes mistakes happen or the machine doesn’t do its full job, and then you get discounted “oops” bags of goodies. It’s just as tasty, but not as pretty. For the chocolate lover, I say “who cares?!” We bought a couple bags and munched on them throughout our weekend.

Have you ever visited a candy factory…or any other kind of fun factory?